I believe that people who think it’s better to be anything other than #1 are just fooling themselves….click through rates and conversions aside, The fact lies that you’ll get 3 1/2 times more traffic being #1 as opposed to #2, and the numbers keep sliding from there.

I think the people who are talking about not being #1 are referring to the quality of the traffic and not necessarily the quanitity. That is something more easily done with paid rather than free search.

[…] One benefit to SEO professionals from the release of the AOL data is that we are now able to use an actual sample data set to calculate some important search related statistics. Jim Boykin notes a post on Earnersforum where they used the AOL Data to figure out click through rates for the the top 10 positions. […]

[…] The AOL user search data has been harvested to determine the CTR (Click Through Rate) for ranking number 1 vs. number 2-10. The sample size is large enough and broad enough that we can infer that this average holds true across many verticals: […]

[…] From Earners Forum comes some interesting data about clickthroughs garnered from the AOL data blunder last week. I like the presentation of data found in a comment on Jim Boykin’s blog the best, though: Results in: Total Searches: 9,038,794 Total Clicks: 4,926,623 […]

It would be interesting to hear from google, yahoo, and msn what their click stats look like compared to AOL. In theory you could determine the best search engine by who has the largest percentage of clicks on the first topic.

You can also find this information (top 10 CTR) in Neilsen’s recent Web Usability book. It’s on page 40 if your curious. There is also an iProspect study with some CTR data. You can use several sources and then weight each source depending on how well you trust it.

[…] AOL accidentally released some organic search data* for one day and from that data a smart math-minded SEO in the Earners Forum figured out click through rates for the top 10 positions in search results. This is some key info that could be used to project Google’s SERP % breakdown. I got wind of the news from another Internet Marketing Innovator […]

[…] This is something I have to disagree with. When I’m doing keyword research I don’t look at how many search results there are for a phrase….to me it doesn’t matter if there’s 10 million results, or if there’s only 50 results….to me what matters is "What do the top 10 have going for them" and do I have a chance of getting into the top 10. And the tool I use to analyze that, I just happened to have built myself (We’ll I told my programmer what I wanted, and he built it) – the Cool SEO Tool. Again. I don’t care if there 10 million sites for a phrase or 50 sites for a phrase…the whole game is "Can you get into the top 10". (Here’s more info on why that’s all that matters). […]

Hi,
that information is very usefull! Thanx a lot.
Now it would be interesting, how many people who clicked on Rank1 came back an click on Rank2, 3, … With other words: How many percent did not find on Rank1 what they really have seach for…

Good and interesting info, the difference is much bigger than I thought. Wonder what the difference is between 10 and 11 or 10 and 21. In theory they should have better click through rate for being on top of the page.

AOL is a little different from a lot of the other search engines. As once you’ve used an “AOL search word” you are pretty much going to find that which has already been tagged for that word. I doubt that these numbers are representative of what happens on Ask, Google or Yahoo or MSN… and for that matter. As AOL isn’t one of the top search engines/directories… how can you actually regard this info as anything more than just a little interesting?

It’s pretty interesting to know these facts. I wonder if all search engines have similar numbers or if the numbers at google are totally different. Even more interesting would be to know how organic results compared to paid results would look like.

Great information on organic click through rates. Guido, most likely these numbers match Google’s because Google powers AOLs search results.

I would believe that the paid results would get a lower CTR by the very nature of it being paid. However, for commerce related searches like ipod or something, it may in fact yield a hire CTR because those paid listings are commerce related. If you are doing more of a research or informational search, my guess would be the organic listings would have a higher CTR but I have no hard data to prove any of this,